Participants aim to streamline user experience and consolidate RWA lending market liquidity

August 27, 2024 – Centrifuge, the platform for tokenized real-world assets, today announced the launch of the first RWA lending market on Base using the Morpho Protocol.  The Morpho Vaults will be curated by Steakhouse Financial and Re7 Labs to include collateral from multiple tokenization platforms: Centrifuge, Midas and Hashnote.

This is the first permissioned lending market integrated with Coinbase Verifications. Coinbase recently launched Verifications which allows a Coinbase customer to self-attest they’ve been KYC’d by Coinbase following the Ethereum Attestation Standard. This integration allows the protocol/application to offer solutions to only wallets that have attested, streamlining their onboarding process seamlessly through a single click.

“Integrating Coinbase Verifications into a web3 marketplace like Morpho creates a better user experience for institutional customers to safely access these opportunities onchain. We’re excited to see the onchain market grow using this attestation tool in the Coinbase Wallet.” - said Anthony Bassili, Head of Tokenization at Coinbase

The underlying Morpho markets will allow for the collateralization and borrowing against Anemoy’s Liquid Treasury Fund (LTF), Midas’s Short Term US Treasuries (mTBILL) and Hashnote’s US Yield Coin (USYC). Each issuer provides a unique approach. The borrowers leverage this tool to solve for liquidity demands without liquidating the position.

“We think it's ideal to collectively gather lender liquidity alongside other issuers in Morpho Vaults to drive as much size and efficiency as possible instead of fragmenting future RWA markets,” said Lucas Vogelsang, Co-founder of Centrifuge. “Treasury tokens are a clear first asset class to build utility around due to their high liquidity and riskless and stable nature. That’s not to say higher yielding investment grade credit products won’t soon be added.”

After evaluating different lending protocols, Centrifuge chose Morpho because it’s battle tested, has an active user base and the nature of isolated markets allow for easy segregation and permissioned tokens.

"Institutions need to justify transitioning their assets onchain, either by using these assets as collateral for refinancing or earning yield," said Paul Frambot, Co-founder of Morpho Labs. "Our goal with Morpho was to build the most trusted and reliable lending infrastructure, and we're excited to see RWA issuers like Centrifuge choose it to launch new lending markets."

The market represents a significant step in creating new financial onchain infrastructure including:

• First market launched with multiple RWA issuers: consolidating liquidity and giving market participants ultimate flexibility.

• First RWA Market on Base: Tapping low fees and huge scalability potential.

• First institutional use case of Coinbase Verifications: Streamlining onboarding and user experience.

At launch, the market offers several benefits of supplying liquidity as a lender including increased liquidity and higher yields through incentives. The next step will be added benefits to borrow against the tokens, including immediate liquidity and leverage on the underlying asset. If DeFi wants to expand to institutions, the key offchain infrastructure they already enjoy needs to be here first.

About Centrifuge

Founded in 2017, Centrifuge, creates better technology for financial products. Centrifuge provides asset managers a way to tokenize, manage and distribute their funds onchain and investors better access to a diversified portfolio of high-quality tokenized assets.